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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

“It’s their world and they enjoy it,” said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school. “They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future. The boys knew a lot about it before we even started, but the girls were happy to create and build something too – it’s not any different from arts or woodcraft. The students themselves are enjoying the unconventional teaching method,” she added.

Released in late 2011, Minecraft has proven to be extremely popular with over 40 million registered players, and demands that players find creative solutions to construction problems. A similar project has surfaced up for Minecraft-based education, named as MinecraftEdu, which is the collaboration of a small team of educators and programmers from the U.S. and Finland. The group is working with Mojang AB, the creators of Minecraft, to make the game affordable and accessible to schools everywhere.

“Minecraft is an amazingly simple way to teach very basic spacial reasoning as well as community-centric thinking,” says SiliconANGLE contributor and editor Kyt Dotson. “It may be a game, but it also produces a creative ‘sandbox’ space that can be molded by virtual hands to create almost anything; but at the same time with multiple participants it requires a level of cooperation for any project.

“On YouTube, magnificent structures and projects have been displayed that took many man-hours and from three to fifteen participants. It’s a virtual Play-Doh combined with construction paper and crayons that works as a brilliant tool of education could teach not just how to use computers to collaborate but also introduce the next generation to virtual worlds.”

About Isha Suri

Isha Suri is a staff writer for SiliconANGLE covering social news and security trends. If you have a story idea or news tip, send it to @SiliconAngle on Twitter.